Artwork tends to be an abstraction of artistic vision applied to fantasy or reality, frozen in a moment. Think of a painting, or song, or movie. The present technologies concern tools for artists and creative professionals allowing creation and delivery of more holistic experiences to audiences, across multiple dimensions including time, space, media, materials, and senses. Through these tools, art will become less discrete, and more continuous, engaging, and collaborative.
Crude notions akin to certain aspects of the present technology have been presaged to some extent by posters and magazine ads employing barcodes, digital watermarks, or image recognition technologies to link to websites, including Digimarc's work detailed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,947,571, 7,003,731 and 7,206,820. FIGS. 1A and 1B show some examples of other artwork employing signaling technologies (barcodes). However, such works are not understood to be created with the tools detailed herein, or have the later-described attributes.
Other related work is detailed in Digimarc's application Ser. No. 12/271,772, filed Nov. 14, 2008 (published as 20100119208); 61/157,153, filed Mar. 3, 2009; and Ser. No. 12/490,980, filed Jun. 24, 2009 (published as 20100205628). However, those applications focus more on detection of signals from television content, and related applications. The present application, in contrast, more concerns tools used in creating content.
As a programming expedient, some graphics software may assign internal identifiers to different elements of an artwork (e.g., layers, and possibly even individual brush strokes). However, such identifiers are understood to be for use by the software only in connection with its own operations; such identifiers are not accessible, e.g., for augmenting the experience of audiences via digital devices and networks.
Certain embodiments of the present technology can be used to encode digital signals into artwork to create a network dimension that may be applied to all major forms of artistic expression, including graphic arts, music, songs, multi-media, etc. Through use of these tools, digital signals become a novel addition to the artist's palette. These signals can add significant aesthetic and commercial value to conventional works of art. For convenience, the detailed description focuses on graphic arts.
The foregoing and other features and advantages of the present technology will be more readily apparent from the following detailed description, which proceeds with reference to the accompanying drawings.